With the rapid development and popularization of Internet, the video technology based on the stream media is used more and more widely. The application mainly focuses on video-on-demand, distance education, video conference, digital library, etc. The transmission of the stream media has strict demand on bandwidth, delay and data loss rate, and other QOS (quality of service) related parameters. With the increase of user amount, traditional Client/Server (‘C/S’ in short) model has heavy load on central server, which can not guarantee the QOS.
System based on P2P (Peer-to-Peer) protocol has balanced load, self-organization, high fault-tolerant ability, and some other advantage. In the Internet topological structure based on P2P protocol, all user equipments (e.g. personal computer) share the same role, action, responsibility and obligation. The user equipments in this kind of internet topological structure can exchange data with each other while bypassing the central server. Each user equipment can act as either a server or a client end. It can download data from another user equipment and send data to still another user equipment at the same time. Thus, the more user equipments in the network, the higher speed of the data transmission. This structure highly improves the efficiency of the bandwidth and the reliability of the network obviously.
The current P2P based media broadcasting mainly focuses on video-on-demand. With the increasing importance of internet in our daily life, the demand on the network live broadcasting is also increasing. Comparing to the traditional live broadcasting, the network live broadcasting provides users with better initiative control and more choices. Examples are taken as popular match live broadcasting, games live broadcasting, etc. There are a large amount of live broadcasting providers of such activities. The providers publish the data on the Internet, and the audience can select their favorite live broadcasting program conveniently.
Until now, no efficient solution has been found to setup a stable live broadcasting structure with high transmission efficiency.